lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2012]   [Mar]   [23]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
SubjectRe: sched: Avoid SMT siblings in select_idle_sibling() if possible
From
Date
On Thu, 2012-03-22 at 21:02 +0530, Srivatsa Vaddagiri wrote: 
> * Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> [2012-03-06 10:14:11]:
>
> > > I did some experiments with volanomark and it does turn out to
> > > be sensitive to SD_BALANCE_WAKE, while the other wake-heavy
> > > benchmark that I am dealing with (Trade) benefits from it.
> >
> > Does volanomark still do yield(), thereby invoking a random
> > shuffle of thread scheduling and pretty much voluntarily
> > ejecting itself from most scheduler performance considerations?
> >
> > If it uses a real locking primitive such as futexes then its
> > performance matters more.
>
> Some more interesting results on more recent tip kernel.

Yeah, interesting. I find myself ever returning to this message, as
gears grind away trying to imagine what's going on in those vcpus.

> Machine : 2 Quad-core Intel X5570 CPU w/ H/T enabled (16 cpus)
> Kernel : tip (HEAD at ee415e2)
> guest VM : 2.6.18 linux kernel based enterprise guest
>
> Benchmarks are run in two scenarios:
>
> 1. BM -> Bare Metal. Benchmark is run on bare metal in root cgroup
> 2. VM -> Benchmark is run inside a guest VM. Several cpu hogs (in
> various cgroups) are run on host. Cgroup setup is as below:
>
> /sys (cpu.shares = 1024, hosts all system tasks)
> /libvirt (cpu.shares = 20000)
> /libvirt/qemu/VM (cpu.shares = 8192. guest VM w/ 8 vcpus)
> /libvirt/qemu/hoga (cpu.shares = 1024. hosts 4 cpu hogs)
> /libvirt/qemu/hogb (cpu.shares = 1024. hosts 4 cpu hogs)
> /libvirt/qemu/hogc (cpu.shares = 1024. hosts 4 cpu hogs)
> /libvirt/qemu/hogd (cpu.shares = 1024. hosts 4 cpu hogs)
>
> First BM (bare metal) scenario:
>
> tip tip + patch
>
> volano 1 0.955 (4.5% degradation)
> sysbench [n1] 1 0.9984 (0.16% degradation)
> tbench 1 [n2] 1 0.9096 (9% degradation)

Those make sense, fast path cycles added.

> Now the more interesting VM scenario:
>
> tip tip + patch
>
> volano 1 1.29 (29% improvement)
> sysbench [n3] 1 2 (100% improvement)
> tbench 1 [n4] 1 1.07 (7% improvement)
> tbench 8 [n5] 1 1.26 (26% improvement)
> httperf [n6] 1 1.05 (5% improvement)
> Trade 1 1.31 (31% improvement)
>
> Notes:
>
> n1. sysbench was run with 16 threads.
> n2. tbench was run on localhost with 1 client
> n3. sysbench was run with 8 threads
> n4. tbench was run on localhost with 1 client
> n5. tbench was run over network with 8 clients
> n6. httperf was run as with burst-length of 100 and wsess of 100,500,0
>
> So the patch seems to be a wholesome win when VCPU threads are waking
> up (in a highly contended environment). One reason could be that any assumption
> of better cache hits by running (vcpu) threads on its prev_cpu may not
> be fully correct as vcpu threads could represent many different threads
> internally?
>
> Anyway, there are degradations as well, considering which I see several
> possibilities:
>
> 1. Do balance-on-wake for vcpu threads only.

That's what your numbers say to me with this patch. I'm not getting the
why, but your patch appears to reduce vcpu internal latencies hugely.

> 2. Document tuning possibility to improve performance in virtualized
> environment:
> - Either via sched_domain flags (disable SD_WAKE_AFFINE
> at all levels and enable SD_BALANCE_WAKE at SMT/MC levels)
> - Or via a new sched_feat(BALANCE_WAKE) tunable
>
> Any other thoughts or suggestions for more experiments?

Other than nuke select_idle_sibling() entirely instead, none here.

-Mike



\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2012-03-23 07:41    [W:0.071 / U:0.816 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site